My success, part of it certainly,
is that I have focused in on a few things.
– Bill Gates

Once you have a hoshin plan detailing what your organization’s priorities are, it’s time to face the reality of all the other projects you and your group are currently working on. This is often a “come-to-Jesus” time when organizational politics can reach a fever pitch, as project owners pitch why their projects, perhaps their raison d’être, deserve survival. It is also a great time to demonstrate the power of the hoshin plan as well as your leadership commitment to a new, defined path forward.

Compile a list of all current projects and significant activities. (This in itself will probably be an eye-opening experience.) Then, as a team, map that list against your principles, mission, why?, and hoshin plan. The hoshin plan will not list all the company’s appropriate or valuable projects, but it should contain the highest- priority objectives. All other projects must align to the principles, why?, and mission, and support and not conflict with the plan.

Project managers and teams on projects that no longer align with the organization’s future path should not be fearful. If done correctly, the projects on the hoshin plan will stretch the organization and need experienced project managers and teams to work on them. Think about how much easier your leadership role will be when all projects are identified and aligned with a hoshin plan that the organization owns and supports, not to mention the resources that are being saved or better invested.

Once again, consider doing the same for you personally. What are you working on that isn’t giving you value or contributing to your own plan? Eliminating the nonessentials in your life will give you more time and focus to create something you want even more.

Make your work to be in keeping with your purpose.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Vision and mission statements have long been the rage in organizations as they supposedly define what the organization is about. Do you know what your organization’s vision or mission is? Could you tell me what either one is, right now—without looking it up? I thought not. I bet they’re hanging on the wall in some conference room, gathering dust. Unfortunately, this is all too common.

Another problem with vision and mission statements is that the terms themselves aren’t very clear and create confusion. Employees always seem to wonder what the difference between the vision and mission is. Also, the mission statement of the company often does not reflect the reality of what the company is trying to create. I’ve seen many cases where the true mission of a company was to make money and the vision was to make a lot of money. Seriously.

This is why I prefer a purpose, or “why?” statement. I believe it is far clearer in terms of definition, and therefore easier to own and promote. Why did you create your company? Why does it exist? What problem are you trying to solve?

The why? of Gemba Academy is to “remove the struggle of continuous improvement training.” It’s simple, but it says a lot. We started the company to help smaller organizations that other- wise could not access high quality continuous improvement training, but we also include large multinationals that are struggling to deploy training across global locations.

Like many other organizations that use a purpose statement instead of a vision statement, we also have a mission that further defines what we are trying to accomplish. Our mission statement talks about how we create high-quality content, then we help organizations undertake and sustain their continuous improvement journeys.

The ideas behind these statements are only useful if a company puts them into practice, and to achieve this, everyone in an organization needs to be involved. Although the founders, owners, and leadership team often work to create an organization’s principles, why?, and mission, it is important to engage employees by involving them in the planning process (we’ll discuss this in more detail in the Create the Hoshin Plan section). By doing so, you create acceptance, ownership, and understanding of the foundational statements. Then everyone can use the same core set of principles, the same why? statement, and the same mission statement to review and analyze your organization.

Going beyond your organization, what about you? What is your purpose, your why? Cornell University researchers recently confirmed that a sense of purpose decreases impulsivity, thereby making choices that pay of better in the long term. This is something to contemplate on your next seijaku (quietude) experience.

Many organizations jump to trying to write down their vision or mission statement before taking the time to really think about and define their core principles. Principles are the foundation upon which the company is built and (hopefully) operates. They are so important that you should be willing to sacrifice significant business, or even the company itself, to preserve the principle.

In private companies and smaller organizations, the principles often come from the values of the owners or founders. For example, a company I used to work for was owned by a couple of devout Catholics. Because of this, the entire organization knew there were some products that we would not make for any price because they conflicted with Catholic beliefs. The employees fully supported that principle, even though it cost the company business.

I’m very proud that the company I co-founded, Gemba Academy, values ethics, integrity, and respect for people above all else. We know our success is built on the efforts and creativity of our people. We respect our people by having an unlimited vacation policy, being transparent with our business operations, and, for a very small company, having a strong benefits package that includes health care, 401(k), and profit sharing. This respect extends to our customers too. We’ve had situations where customers wanted to purchase a product, but we knew it wasn’t the right fit for them. We openly told them, demonstrating respect for the customers and our values.

Think about your personal principles and values. What do you truly care about? Your principles should be so important that you’d be willing to give up business—such as not taking a job, even if your livelihood depended on it—to not cross them. Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic and currently a professor at Harvard, calls this the True North, or inner compass. Principles are important because they create the perspective, boundaries, and culture for the organization. Without them, there is a good chance that the culture will evolve on its own, based on the values of the stronger- willed employees.

What are the core principles and values of your organization and yourself ?

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow. – Ralph Emerson

It’s that arbitrary time of the year when many folks reflect on the past and set goals for the coming year. I enjoy reading how other people in the Lean world approach this activity as planning, hoshin, and reflection, hansei, are core components of Lean. Karen Martin just went into hers with some nice detail, and I especially like the ritualistic aspect of her process. Matt May has described his in the past as well, with a nod to Seth Godin’s “shopping list” concept.

I have a similar process that I’ve alluded to in a few previous posts. Each year toward the end of December my wife and I take a vacation to someplace nice and quiet. Instead of playing tourist to visit a bunch of new places like we usually do in the summer, this trip is purposely to have some R&R, reconnect, and recenter. This latest one, from which I returned just last night, was two weeks at a beach house on Nevis, with nothing to do except relax, eat, talk, and watch the sunset. And, for me, perform my annual ritual.

I take a look at my journal – a well-worn Moleskine (usually volumes 1, 2, and 3 by the end of the year), compare the plan to what happened, read the notes, and generally reflect on the year. Although the process has weekly, monthly, and quarterly components, the end-of-year reflection is the most intense. What did I achieve, what did I miss, what countermeasures do I need to put into place, and what should I do the next year.

This is all fairly standard, and many folks do it. It eventually turns into what I call “My Shibumi” – after Matt May’s book, The Shibumi Strategy, and also because it somehow makes me think of My Sharona by The Knack, a band I unexpectedly partied with a couple decades ago. I create key goals for the upcoming year, usually a couple each in categories such as physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and professional.

But the most important goal I set is my “do something different” goal. This is the one that stretches me out of my comfort zone, challenges my perspectives and biases, and helps turn me into a well-rounded human and citizen of the planet.

I’ve had this type of annual goal for about twenty years, initially informally but very formal for the past decade or so. Earlier ones were fairly physical, like ski five European countries in six days, learn to windsurf, dive, and hang glide, and run a full marathon.

As I’ve become older they have become more intellectual, such as a deep dive into Buddhism and last year’s exploration of the history of the Bible. I read over a dozen books on the topic, and it really opened my eyes to the complexity of the 500,000 variants resulting from intentional and unintentional translation and transcription errors, Church politics, and archeological methods. I’ve also learned to program HTML, rebuilt a 1973 Triumph Spitfire, explored being vegan and vegetarian (ending up as a “pescatarian” for the past decade), and quit a great job at a great company to do my own thing.

I’m by far not the only one that creates such annual stretch goals. Consider Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. He has had goals to learn Mandarin, meet a new person each and every day, only eat meat he butchered himself, and write one thank you note each day.

He choses the goal after an analysis of the gap between where he is and where he wants to be. A key outcome is that he learns something new, and often unexpected. Trying to learn Mandarin taught him that he didn’t listen well and a year of killing animals made him consider becoming vegetarian. The goal to meet a new person each day, which he achieved by giving face-to-face chats at schools, helped him understand the personal side of problems with immigration policy. Those secondary effects are often more important and meaningful than the original goal itself.

So what’s my goal for 2016? I toyed with the perennial “get into shape” but after only a couple months on Paul Aker’s Lean Health program, I’ve lost over 15 pounds and am in the best shape I’ve been since the 1990s. If you want to get into shape by leveraging Lean, get his new book. I also thought about a deep dive into minimalism and simplicity, but my wife and I have been doing that at a less intense level for several years so I decided it wasn’t radical enough. The slow and steady improvement was working well. I’ve wanted to finish a book on the nexus of Lean and Zen, but I pretty much did that also while on Nevis (stay tuned!), so that’s out.

I’ve decided on another intellectual pursuit to broaden my horizons. I’m going to read one of the top works of literature from each of the major ethnic groups or geographical areas – European, Latin American, Chinese, Hindustani, Arabic, African, and so forth. It should work out to roughly one a month. I’ve decided to start this month with Latin American. Since I’ve already read several books by Mario Vargas Llosa, a Nobel Prize winner I met in Peru many years ago, the first one will be One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, also a Nobel Prize winner.

How will you explore out of the box this year? Perhaps more importantly, how will you ensure you actually do it, and why? You’ll probably be amazed at what you learn about yourself – and the world.

This Thanksgiving I am thankful for learning the power of being thankful. More than ever I am convinced it is the most powerful personal and professional leadership habit.

For years I have had an increasingly refined and meaningful daily routine. Each morning I begin the day with the following:

Twenty minutes of meditation in classic Zen style using the counting of breaths to slow the mind and become truly aware of the present. This is remarkably difficult to do – it took months of practice to get to even five minutes, a reflection of how voluminous the flow of ideas and thoughts really is. Meditation is often confused with prayer, but it’s very different although also very complementary. It is an intentional slowing of the flow of thoughts in order to understand that flow of thoughts, to become mindful and aware.

Five minutes of giving thanks and prayer, always trying to find one new person or thing to be thankful for.

Five minutes of silent planning, identifying the three key tasks I want to complete today, in line with my personal and professional hoshin. With practice, five minutes is more than enough time. I then write those down. Once again, writing by hand into a notebook creates ownership and understanding – unlike typing into an electronic planner.

Only afterwards do I read The Wall Street Journal, have coffee, and check email. At some point in the day there’s a crossfit class, beach run, or other exercise. Then in the evenings I have a complementary routine:

Review the three key tasks I wrote down to see if they were completed. It’s amazing how much can get done if just three meaningful tasks are truly accomplished each and every day.

A few minutes of hansei reflection on why or why not those tasks were accomplished and, most importantly, what I will change in order to do a better job at accomplishing them tomorrow.

A few minutes of thanks and gratitude. Lately this is done out under the stars in my new ofuro soaking tub, with a glass of rhone blend. There is nothing quite as humbling as looking up at millions of stars, especially with a minor buzz.

The periods of reflection on gratitude at the beginning and end of each day create calm bookends to what can be chaos. As problem solvers we are naturally dispositioned to focus on the negative, taking for granted the positive – to the extent that we often become oblivious and unaware of just how much positive there is in our lives. Creating an intentional focus on gratitude realigns that perspective back to reality. Then expressing that gratitude in daily life by realizing the waste of complaining, complimenting and helping others, or just smiling, reinforces the power of being thankful.

Intentionally discovering gratitude, every day, has changed my perspective on life more than any other personal or professional leadership habit. I’ve discovered I have a lot to be thankful for.

I am thankful for parents and family that continue to instill in me the ability to think independently and trust my instincts, act courageously and take appropriate risks, have a desire to see the world, and explore the strong spiritual foundation that they have surrounded me with.

I am thankful that this desire to explore has let me visit over fifty countries, going and seeing, to better understand. This helps create reality where most just have perceptions, unfortunately generally incorrect, created by sound bites and the Facebook culture.

I am thankful that the strong spiritual foundation I was raised on has grown even stronger as I explored its nooks and crannies, morphed into forms I wouldn’t have expected, and has become very real. I feel sad for those who have not felt the hand of God, very visibly and directly in my case, as that unmistakable reality creates incredible comfort and peace.

I am thankful for my wife, who accepts me for the sometimes strange creature I am, trusts me to make good decisions for our family, and is my enthusiastic partner in exploring the world.

I am thankful for the lessons learned from difficulty, in particular the struggles over years with a family member’s medical condition that has helped me become much more understanding, compassionate, loving, and kind.

I am thankful for special friends that have been there for me during those times of difficulty, helping to guide and support me in many ways. They ask for nothing in return, although I will spend the rest of my life trying to find ways to return the favor – to them and to others.

I am thankful for the opportunity to live where I do, in the peacefulness of a small town on the coast, being able to look at the sun setting over the ocean each evening. The beauty of nature reflects God.

I am thankful for the ability to think abstractly, to wonder about what I don’t know, and to embrace possibility. As just one example I am fascinated by quantum entanglement theory and the potential ramifications on communication, the connections between life in the universe, and the soul itself. Is this the link between science and God?

I am thankful for the wisdom of colleagues I have met over the years, in the lean world and beyond, who have taught me so much which has enabled my success. Those colleagues, including readers of this blog, continually challenge me and help me grow.

I am thankful for my Gemba Academy business partners who align with my desire to teach, give back, and create a great company for our team members, instead of simply focusing on growth and profit. Interestingly, more growth and profit seems to come by teaching, giving back, and creating a great company. Funny how that happens…

I am thankful for our Gemba Academy team members, who are the foundation for our success, and are truly a pleasure to work with each day. Every day I am energized by their creativity, talent, and drive.

I remember two decades ago when I was in my first real executive role and I was asked to come up with a strategy for my business unit. I was in control and I could develop and set a direction! I could finally use some of what I had learned in those traditional business school courses and seminars.

SWOTs, PESTs, Porter Five Forces, and the like were created and analyzed. Assessments performed, gaps identified, and finally strategies created. A plan for technologies, markets, people, and quality was developed, with detailed action plans for each. It took up a binder – a very nice-looking binder that was duplicated and presented to my management team. We all dutifully looked in awe at what we had created. And proceeded to put it on a shelf. I bet some are still on those same shelves, even if the date reads 1995. And then we went back into the business of firefighting the day-to-day issues.

Why? For starters it was too long, by about a factor of twenty. Did we really think we'd refer back to it on an ongoing basis? And just as with traditional budgeting, the vast majority of it was obsolete within a couple months. The exercise of multi-faceted self analysis was valuable – the first time. But it was a point in time.

You'd think I would have learned my lesson, but I didn't. I went through that same exercise a couple more times in different, larger, organizations. More pretty binders sitting on shelves. One of the last ones was even a hoshin style plan, with long term strategies tied to intermediate term objectives, which were then tied to annual goals. Just a whole long list of them.

And that was the problem: the desire for detail, specificity, depth, and breadth that created abundance and complexity. We realized this issue when we became fairly good with hansei – a quarterly reflection on our performance that we happened to have at a local winery. Luckily we had a scribe to record our brilliant a-ha's before the wine erased them from our memory.

We took a step back and looked at ourselves again. We reduced our long-term strategies to three, tied to a similar number of intermediate term objectives, tied to about five annual goals. That was it for a fairly large multi-site operation. We allowed the hoshin plan to evolve and change throughout the year as situations changed – similar to how some enlightened companies have dispensed with the annual budgeting process to use rolling and ongoing financial decisionmaking. We mapped all existing activities against that plan, and killed or put on hold projects that weren't aligned.

That's when real forward progress began to happen. And it was amazing how much time we freed up by not working on supposedly worthy projects that were not aligned with the strategy.

When I go into organizations I often see similar binders on the shelves, almost always gathering dust. I counsel the executives to try it again, this time dramatically reducing the length, and creating an ongoing hansel process. It seems to work well.

Earlier this month Nick Tasler wrote a piece for HBR titled "It's Time to Put Your Strategy on a Diet" where he drew several parallels between strategic planning and eating – and dieting. Limit your plate size by reducing the number of priorities. Let them eat cake tomorrow by putting off but not forgetting about great ideas that don't happen to align with the strategy. Avoid the "what the hell" effect though strict adherence to the strategy. And surround yourself with healthy eaters that are skilled at leading.

That last point relates to creating a culture where leadership can thrive. Leadership by smart, thinking leaders, not by control. Similar to what I mentioned a few weeks ago when I told you about how Netflix hires great thinking leaders, then sets very few rules. It's also what Peter Drucker meant when he said "culture eats strategy for breakfast" – which Mark Fields of Ford embraced a few years later.

But another article in HBR by Allesandro Di Fiore may take the concept of strategy brevity a little too much to the extreme. In "The Art of Crafting a 15-Word Strategy Statement" he suggests just that: 15 words. Really? Although you wouldn't know it from this post, and colleagues who interact with me via email would laugh, I happen to be fond of the 5 Sentences concept. Fond of it, but completely ineffectual at implementing it.

A 15-word strategy statement? He gives a few examples, such as IKEA, and it could be a good exercise as part of the strategy development process. I'm a little skeptical of it though, for the same reason that in my last couple of positions I've purposely not wasted time on mission and vision statements. They are either so broad as to be meaningless, or so narrow that they are constraining, and in almost all cases they end up on a wall in the corner of a conference room. Often next to the shelf holding a thick binder labeled "strategic plan." Be honest, the real mission of a company is to create money for the shareholders, and the vision is a lot of money. Instead we created a short statement of principles which guided our organization, and that was more than sufficient.

So as you look up from reading this post and perhaps notice your own binder on a shelf, think about taking another stab at it. Narrow it down. Very concisely, what are the three, at most four long-term strategies that your organization needs to be focused on? What three or four measurable objectives must happen in the intermediate three to five year time fram for that to happen? What four or five projects must be accompllished this year to enable that? Then, perhaps most importantly, what is your organization working on right now that doesn't align with that plan? Stop it. Formally reflect on that strategic plan at least once a quarter, with your team. Adjust and evolve – don't just set it in stone once a year.